Apologetics

by Benjamin B. Warfield

I. Significance of the Term

Since
Planck (1794) and Schleiermacher (1811), "apologetics" has been the
accepted name of one of the theological disciplines or departments of theological science.
The term is derived from the Greek apologeisthai, which embodies as its central
notion the idea of "defense." In its present application, however, it has
somewhat shifted its meaning, and we speak accordingly of apologetics and apologies in
contrast with each other. The relation between these two is not that of theory and
practice (so e.g. Dusterdieck), nor yet that of genus and species (so e.g. Kubel). That is
to say, apologetics is not a formal science in which the principles exemplified in
apologies are investigated, as the principles of sermonizing are investigated in
homiletics. Nor is it merely the sum of all existing or all possible apologies, or their
quintessence, or their scientific exhibition, as dogmatics is the scientific statement of
dogmas. Apologies are defenses of Christianity, in its entirety, in its essence, or in
some one or other of its elements or presuppositions, as against either all assailants,
actual or conceivable, or some particular form or instance of attack; though, of course,
as good defenses they may rise above mere defenses and become vindications. Apologetics
undertakes not the defense, not even the vindication, but the establishment, not,
strictly speaking, of Christianity, but rather of that knowledge of God which Christianity
professes to embody and seeks to make efficient in the world, and which it is the business
of theology scientifically to explicate. It may, of course, enter into defense and
vindication when in the prosecution of its task it meets with opposing points of view and
requires to establish its own standpoint or conclusions. Apologies may, therefore, be
embraced in apologetics, and form ancillary portions of its structure, as they may also do
in the case of every other theological discipline. It is, moreover, inevitable that this
or that element or aspect of apologetics will be more or less emphasized and cultivated,
as the need of it is from time to time more or less felt. But apologetics does not derive
its contents or take its form or borrow its value from the prevailing opposition; but
preserves through all varying circumstances its essential character as a positive and
constructive science which has to do with opposition only- like any other constructive
science--as the refutation of opposing views becomes from time to time incident to
construction. So little is defense or vindication of the essence of apologetics that there
would be the same reason for its existence and the same necessity for its work, were there
no opposition in the world to be encountered and no contradiction to be overcome. It finds
its deepest ground, in other words, not in the accidents which accompany the efforts of
true religion to plant, sustain, and propagate itself in this world; not even in that most
pervasive and most portentous of all these accidents, the accident of sin; but in the
fundamental needs of the human spirit. If it is incumbent on the believer to be able to
give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is impossible for him to be a believer
without a reason for the faith that is in him; and it is the task of apologetics to bring
this reason clearly out in his consciousness, and make its validity plain. It is, in other
words, the function of apologetics to investigate, explicate, and establish the grounds on
which a theology -- a science, or systematized knowledge of God- is possible; and on the
basis of which every science which has God for its object must rest, if it be a true
science with claims to a place within the circle of the sciences. It necessarily takes its
place, therefore, at the head of the departments of theological science and finds its task
in the establishment of the validity of that knowledge of God which forms the
subject-matter of these departments; that we may then proceed through the succeeding
departments of exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical theology, to explicate,
appreciate, systematize, and propagate it in the world.

II. Place Among The Theological Disciplines

It must be admitted
that considerable confusion has reigned with respect to the conception and function of
apologetics, and its place among the theological disciplines. Nearly every writer has a
definition of his own, and describes the task of the discipline in a fashion more or less
peculiar to himself; and there is scarcely a corner in the theological encyclopedia into
which it has not been thrust. Planck gave it a place among the exegetical disciplines;
others contend that its essence is historical; most wish to assign it either to systematic
or practical theology. Nosselt denies it all right of existence; Palmer confesses
inability to classify it; Rabiger casts it formally out of the encyclopedia, but
reintroduces it under the different name of "theory of religion." Tholuck
proposed that it should be apportioned through the several departments; and Cave actually
distributes its material through three separate departments. Much of this confusion is due
to a persistent confusion of apologetics with apologies. If apologetics is the theory of
apology, and its function is to teach men how to defend Christianity, its place is, of
course, alongside of homiletics, catechetics, and poimenics in practical theology. If it
is simply, by way of eminence, the apology of Christianity, the systematically organized
vindication of Christianity in all its elements and details, against all opposition- or in
its essential core against the only destructive opposition -- it of course presupposes the
complete development of Christianity through the exegetical, historical, and systematic
disciplines, and must take its place either as the culminating department of systematic
theology, or as the intellectualistic side of practical theology, or as an independent
discipline between the two. In this case it can be only artificially separated from
polemic theology and other similar disciplines--if the analysis is pushed so far as to
create these, as is done by F. Duilhe de Saint-Projet who distinguishes between
apologetical, controversial, and polemic theology, directed respectively against
unbelievers, heretics, and fellow believers, and by A. Kuyper who distinguishes between
polemics, elenctics, and apologetics, opposing respectively heterodoxy, paganism, and
false philosophy. It will not be strange, then, if, though separated from these kindred
disciplines it, or some of it, should be again united with them, or some of them, to form
a larger whole to which is given the same encyclopedic position. This is done for example
by Kuyper who joins polemics, elenctics, and apologetics together to form his "antithetic
dogmatologi-cal" group of disciplines; and by F. L. Patton who, after having
distributed the material of apologetics into the two separate disciplines of rational or
philosophical theology, to which as a thetic discipline a place is given at the outset of
the system, and apologetics, joins the latter with polemics to constitute the antithetical
disciplines, while systematic theology succeeds both as part of the synthetic disciplines.

III. Source Of Divergent Views

Much of the diversity
in question is due also, however, to varying views of the thing which apologetics
undertakes to establish; whether it be, for example, the truth of the Christian religion,
or the validity of that knowledge of God which theology presents in systematized form. And
more of it still is due to profoundly differing conceptions of the nature and
subject-matter of that "theology," a department of which apologetics is.
If we think of apologetics as undertaking the defense or the vindication or even the
justification of the "Christian religion," that is one thing; if we think
of it as undertaking the establishment of the validity of that knowledge of God, which "theology"
systematizes, that may be a very different thing. And even if agreement exists upon
the latter conception, there remain the deeply cutting divergences which beset the
definition of "theology" itself. Shall it be defined as the "science of
faith "? or as the "science of religion "? or as the "science
of the Christian religion "? or as the "science of God "? In
other words, shall it be regarded as a branch of psychology, or as a branch of history, or
as a branch of science? Manifestly those who differ thus widely as to what theology is,
cannot be expected to agree as to the nature and function of any one of its disciplines.
If "theology" is the science of faith or of religion, its subject-matter
is the subjective experiences of the human heart; and the function of apologetics is to
inquire whether these subjective experiences have any objective validity. Of course,
therefore, it follows upon the systematic elucidation of these subjective experiences and
constitutes the culminating discipline of "theology." Similarly, if"
theology" is the science of the Christian religion, it investigates the purely
historical question of what those who are called Christians believe; and of course the
function of apologetics is to follow this investigation with an inquiry whether Christians
are justified in believing these things. But if theology is the science of God, it deals
not with a mass of subjective experiences, nor with a section of the history of thought,
but with a body of objective facts; and it is absurd to say that these facts must be
assumed and developed unto their utmost implications before we stop to ask whether they
are facts. So soon as it is agreed that theology is a scientific discipline and has as its
subject-matter the knowledge of God, we must recognize that it must begin by establishing
the reality as objective facts of the data upon which it is based. One may indeed call the
department of theology to which this task is committed by any name which appears to him
appropriate: it may be called "general theology," or "fundamental
theology," or "principial theology," or "philosophical theology,"
or "rational theology," or "natural theology," or any
other of the innumerable names which have been used to describe it. Apologetics is the
name which most naturally suggests itself, and it is the name which, with more or less
accuracy of view as to the nature and compass of the discipline, has been consecrated to
this purpose by a large number of writers from Schleiermacher down (e.g. Pelt, Twesten,
Baum-stark, Swetz, Ottiger, Knoll, Maissoneuve). It powerfully commends itself as plainly
indicating the nature of the discipline, while equally applicable to it whatever may be
the scope of the theology which it undertakes to plant on a secure basis. Whether this
theology recognizes no other knowledge of God than that given in the constitution and
course of nature, or derives its data from the full revelation of God as documented in the
Christian Scriptures, apologetics offers itself with equal readiness to designate the
discipline by which the validity of the knowledge of God set forth is established. It need
imply no more than natural theology requires for its basis; when the theology which it
serves is, however, the complete theology of the Christian revelation, it guards its unity
and protects from the fatally dualistic conception which sets natural and revealed
theology over against each other as separable entities, each with its own separate
presuppositions requiring establish-ment-by which apologetics would be split into two
quite diverse disciplines, given very different places in the theological encyclopedia.

IV. The True Task Of Apologetics

It will already have
appeared how far apologetics may be defined, in accordance with a very prevalent custom
(e.g. Sack, Lechler, Ebrard, Kubel, Lemme) as "the science which establishes the
truth of Christianity as the absolute religion." Apologetics certainly does establish
the truth of Christianity as the absolute religion. But the question of importance here is
how it does this. It certainly is not the business of apologetics to take up each tenet of
Christianity in turn and seek to establish its truth by a direct appeal to reason. Any
attempt to do this, no matter on what philosophical basis the work of demonstration be
begun or by what methods it be pursued, would transfer us at once into the atmosphere and
betray us into the devious devices of the old vulgar rationalism, the primary fault of
which was that it asked for a direct rational demonstration of the truth of each Christian
teaching in turn. The business of apologetics is to establish the truth of Christianity as
the absolute religion directly only as a whole, and in its details only indirectly. That
is to say, we are not to begin by developing Christianity into all its details, and only
after this task has been performed, tardily ask whether there is any truth in all this. We
are to begin by establishing the truth of Christianity as a whole, and only then proceed
to explicate it into its details, each of which, if soundly explicated, has its truth
guaranteed by its place as a detail in an entity already established in its entirety. Thus
we are delivered from what is perhaps the most distracting question which has vexed the
whole history of the discipline. In establishing the truth of Christianity, it has been
perennially asked, are we to deal with all its details (e.g.H.B. Smith), or merely with
the essence of Christianity (e.g. Kubel). The true answer is, neither. Apologetics does
not presuppose either the development of Christianity into its details, or the extraction
from it of its essence. The details of Christianity are all contained in Christianity: the
minimum of Christianity is just Christianity itself. What apologetics undertakes to
establish is just this Christianity itself -- including all its "details" and
involving its "essence "--in its unexplicated and uncompressed entirety,
as the absolute religion. It has for its object the laying of the foundations on which the
temple of theology is built, and by which the whole structure of theology is determined.
It is the department of theology which establishes the constitutive and regulative
principles of theology as a science; and in establishing these it establishes all the
details which are derived from them by the succeeding departments, in their sound
explication and systematization. Thus it establishes the whole, though it establishes the
whole in the mass, so to speak, and not in its details, but yet in its entirety and not in
some single element deemed by us its core, its essence, or its minimum expression.

V. Division Of Apologetics

The subject-matter of
apologetics being determined, its distribution into its parts becomes very much a matter
of course. Having defined apologetics as the proof of the truth of the Christian religion,
many writers naturally confine it to what is commonly known somewhat loosely as the
"evidences of Christianity." Others, defining it as "fundamental
theology," equally naturally confine it to the primary princi-pies of religion in
general. Others more justly combine the two conceptions and thus obtain at least two main
divisions. Thus Hermann Schultz makes it prove "the right of the religious
conception of the world, as over against the tendencies to the denial of religion, and the
right of Christianity as the absolutely perfect manifestation of religion, as over against
the opponents of its permanent significance." He then divides it into two great
sections with a third interposed between them: the first, "the apology of the
religious conception of the world "; the last, "the apology of Christianity
"; while between the two stands" the philosophy of religion, religion in its
historical manifestation." Somewhat less satisfactorily, because with a less firm
hold upon the idea of the discipline, Henry B. Smith, viewing apologetics as "historico-philosophi-cal
dogmatics," charged with the defense of "the whole contents and substance
of the Christian faith," divided the material to much the same effect into what he
calls fundamental, historical, and philosophical apologetics. The first of these
undertakes to demonstrate the being and nature of God; the second, the divine origin and
authority of Christianity; and the third, somewhat lamely as a conclusion to so high an
argument, the superiority of Christianity to all other systems. Quite similarly Francis R.
Beattie divided into (1) fundamental or philosophical apologetics, which deals with the
problem of God and religion; (2) Christian or historical apologetics, which deals with the
problem of revelation and the Scriptures; and (3) applied or practical apologetics, which
deals with the practical efficiency of Christianity in the world. The fundamental truth of
these schematizations lies in the perception that the subject-matter of apologetics
embraces the two great facts of God and Christianity. There is some failure in unity of
conception, however, arising apparently from a deficient grasp of the peculiarity of
apologetics as a department of theological science, and a consequent inability to permit
it as such to determine its own contents and the natural order of its constituent parts.

VI. The Conception Of Theology As A Science

If theology be a
science at all, there is involved in that fact, as in the case of all other sciences, at
least these three things: the reality of its subject-matter, the capacity of the human
mind to receive into itself and rationally to reflect this subject-matter, the existence
of media of communication between the subject-matter and the percipient and understanding
mind. There could be no psychology were there not a mind to be investigated, a mind to
investigate, and a self-consciousness by means of which the mind as an object can be
brought under the inspection of the mind as subject. There could be no astronomy were
there no heavenly bodies to be investigated, no mind capable of comprehending the laws of
their existence and movements, or no means of observing their structure and motion.
Similarly there can be no theology, conceived according to its very name as the science of
God, unless there is a God to form its subject-matter, a capacity in the human mind to
apprehend and so far to comprehend God, and some media by which God is made known to man.
That a theology, as the science of God, may exist, therefore, it must begin by
establishing the existence of God, the capacity of the human mind to know Him, and the
accessibility of knowledge concerning Him. In other words, the very idea of theology as
the science of God gives these three great topics which must be dealt with in its
fundamental department, by which the foundations for the whole structure are laid- God,
religion, revelation. With these three facts established, a theology as the science of God
becomes possible; with them, therefore, an apologetic might be complete. But that, only
provided that in these three topics all the underlying presuppositions of the science of
God actually built up in our theology are established; for example, provided that all the
accessible sources and means of knowing God are exhausted. No science can arbitrarily
limit the data lying within its sphere to which it will attend. On pain of ceasing to be
the science it professes to be, it must exhaust the means of information open to it, and
reduce to a unitary system the entire body of knowledge in its sphere. No science can
represent itself as astronomy, for example, which arbitrarily confines itself to the
information concerning the heavenly bodies obtainable by the unaided eye, or which
discards, without sound ground duly adduced, the aid of, say, the spectroscope. In the
presence of Christianity in the world making claim to present a revelation of God adapted
to the condition and needs of sinners, and documented in Scriptures, theology cannot
proceed a step until it has examined this claim; and if the claim be substantiated, this
substantiation must form a part of the fundamental department of theology in which are
laid the foundations for the systematization of the knowledge of God. In that case, two
new topics are added to the subject-matter with which apologetics must constructively
deal, Christianity--and the Bible. It thus lies in the very nature of apologetics as the
fundamental department of theology, conceived as the science of God, that it should find
its task in establishing the existence of a God who is capable of being known by man and
who has made Himself known, not only in nature but in revelations of His grace to lost
sinners, documented in the Christian Scriptures. When apologetics has placed these great
facts in our hands- God, religion, revelation, Christianity, the Bible--and not till then
are we prepared to go on and explicate the knowledge of God thus brought to us, trace the
history of its workings in the world, systematize it, and propagate it in the world.

VII. The Five Subdivisions Of Apologetics

The primary
subdivisions of apologetics are therefore five, unless for convenience of treatment it is
preferred to sink the third into its most closely related fellow. (1) The first, which may
perhaps be called philosophical apologetics, undertakes the establishment of the being of
God, as a personal spirit, the creator, preserver, and governor of all things. To it
belongs the great problem of theism, with the involved discussion of the antitheistic
theories. (2) The second, which may perhaps be called psychological apologetics,
undertakes the establishment of the religious nature of man and the validity of his
religious sense. It involves the discussion alike of the psychology, the philosophy, and
the phenomenology of religion, and therefore includes what is loosely called "comparative
religion" or the "history of religions." (3) To the third falls the
establishment of the reality of the supernatural factor in history, with the involved
determination of the actual relations in which God stands to His world, and the method of
His government of His rational creatures, and especially His mode of making Himself known
to them. It issues in the establishment of the fact of revelation as the condition of all
knowledge of God, who as a personal Spirit can be known only so far as He expresses
Himself; so that theology differs from all other sciences in that in it the object is not
at the disposal of the subject, but vice versa. (4) The fourth, which may be called
historical apologetics, undertakes to establish the divine origin of Christianity as the
religion of revelation in the special sense of that word. It discusses all the topics
which naturally fall under the popular caption of the "evidences of
Christianity." (5) The fifth, which may be called bibliological apologetics,
undertakes to establish the trustworthiness of the Christian Scriptures as the
documentation of the revelation of God for the redemption of sinners. It is engaged
especially with such topics as the divine origin of the Scriptures; the methods of the
divine operation in their origination; their place in the series of redemptive acts of
God, and in the process of revelation; the nature, mode, and effect of inspiration; and
the like.

VIII. The Value Of Apologetics

The estimate which is put upon
apologetics by scholars naturally varies with the conception which is entertained of its
nature and function. In the wake of the subjectivism introduced by Schleiermacher, it has
become very common to speak of such an apologetic as has just been outlined with no little
scorn. It is an evil inheritance, we are told, from the old supranaturalismus vulgaris,
which "took its standpoint not in the Scriptures but above the Scriptures, and
imagined it could, with formal conceptions, develop a 'ground for the divine authority of
Christianity' (Heubner), and therefore offered proofs for the divine origin of
Christianity, the necessity of revelation, and the credibility of the Scriptures"
(Lemme). To recognize that we can take our standpoint in the Scriptures only after we have
Scriptures, authenticated as such, to take our standpoint in, is, it seems, an outworn
prejudice. The subjective experience of faith is conceived to be the ultimate fact; and
the only legitimate apologetic, just the self-justifica-tion of this faith itself. For
faith, it seems, after Kant, can no longer be looked upon as a matter of reasoning and
does not rest on rational grounds, but is an affair of the heart, and manifests itself
most powerfully when it has no reason out of itself (Brunetiere). If repetition had
probative force, it would long ago have been established that faith, religion, theology,
lie wholly outside of the realm of reason, proof, and demonstration.

It is, however, from
the point of view of rationalism and mysticism that the value of apologetics is most
decried. Wherever rationalistic preconceptions have penetrated, there, of course, the
validity of the apologetic proofs has been in more or less of their extent questioned.
Wherever mystical sentiment has seeped in, there the validity of apologetics has been with
more or less emphasis doubted. At the present moment, the rationalistic tendency is most
active, perhaps, in the form given it by Albrecht Ritschl. In this form it strikes at the
very roots of apologetics, by the distinction it erects between theoretical and religious
knowledge. Religious knowledge is not the knowledge of fact, but a perception of utility;
and therefore positive religion, while it maybe historically conditioned, has no
theoretical basis, and is accordingly not the object of rational proof. In significant
parallelism with this, the mystical tendency is manifesting itself at the present day most
distinctly in a widespread inclination to set aside apologetics in favor of the "witness
of the Spirit." The convictions of the Christian man, we are told, are not the
product of reason addressed to the intellect, but the immediate creation of the Holy
Spirit in the heart. Therefore, it is intimated, we may do very well without these
reasons, if indeed they are not positively noxious, because tending to substitute a barren
intellectualism for a vital faith. It seems to be forgotten that though faith be a moral
act and the gift of God, it is yet formally conviction passing into confidence; and that
all forms of convictions must rest on evidence as their ground, and it is not faith but
reason which investigates the nature and validity of this ground. "He who
believes," says Thomas Aquinas, in words which have become current as an axiom,
"would not believe unless he saw that what he believes is worthy of belief."
Though faith is the gift of God, it does not in the least follow that the faith which God
gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without cognizable ground in right reason.
We believe in Christ because it is rational to believe in Him, not even though it be
irrational. Of course mere reasoning cannot make a Christian; but that is not because
faith is not the result of evidence, but because a dead soul cannot respond to evidence.
The action of the Holy Spirit in giving faith is not apart from evidence, but along with
evidence; and in the first instance consists in preparing the soul for the reception of
the evidence.

IX. Relation Of Apologetics To Christian Faith

This is not to argue
that it is by apologetics that men are made Christians, but that apologetics supplies to
Christian men the systematically organized basis on which the faith of Christian men must
rest. All that apologetics explicates in the forms of systematic proof is implicit in
every act of Christian faith. Whenever a sinner accepts Jesus Christ as his Saviour, there
is implicated in that act a living conviction that there is a God, knowable to man, who
has made Himself known in a revelation of Himself for redemption in Jesus Christ, as is
set down in the Scriptures. It is not necessary for his act of faith that all the grounds
of this conviction should be drawn into full consciousness and given the explicit assent
of his understanding, though it is necessary for his faith that sufficient ground for his
conviction be actively present and working in his spirit. But it is necessary for the
vindication of his faith to reason in the form of scientific judgment, that the grounds on
which it rests be explicated and established. Theology as a science, though it includes in
its culminating discipline, that of practical theology, an exposition of how that
knowledge of God with which it deals objectively may best be made the subjective
possession of man, is not itself the instrument of propaganda; what it undertakes to do is
systematically to set forth this knowledge of God as the object of rational contemplation.
And as it has to set it forth as knowledge, it must of course begin by establishing its
right to rank as such. Did it not do so, the whole of its work would hang in the air, and
theology would present the odd spectacle among the sciences of claiming a place among a
series of systems of knowledge for an elaboration of pure assumptions.

X. The Earliest Apologetics

Seeing that it thus
supplies an insistent need of the human spirit, the world has, of course, never been
without its apologetics. Whenever men have thought at all they have thought about God and
the supernatural order; and whenever they have thought of God and the supernatural order,
there has been present to their minds a variety of more or less solid reasons for
believing in their reality. The enucleation of these reasons into a systematically
organized body of proofs waited of course upon advancing culture. But the advent of
apologetics did not wait for the advent of Christianity; nor are traces of this department
of thought discoverable only in the regions lit up by special revelation. The
philosophical systems of antiquity, especially those which derive from Plato, are far from
empty of apologetical elements; and when in the later stages of its development, classical
philosophy became peculiarly religious, express apologetical material became almost
predominant. With the coming of Christianity into the world, however, as the contents of
the theology to be stated became richer, so the efforts to substantiate it became more
fertile in apologetical elements. We must not confuse the apologies of the early Christian
ages with formal apologetics. Like the sermons of the day, they contributed to apologetics
without being it. The apologetic material developed by what one may call the more
philosophical of the apologists (Aristides, Athenagoras, Tatian, Theophilus, Hermias,
Tertullian) was already considerable; it was largely supplemented by the theological
labors of their successors. In the first instance Christianity, plunged into a
polytheistic environment and called upon to contend with systems of thought grounded in
pantheistic or dualistic assumptions, required to establish its theistic standpoint; and
as over against the bitterness of the Jews and the mockery of the heathen (e.g. Tacitus,
Fronto, Crescens, Lucian), to evince its own divine origin as a gift of grace to sinful
man. Along with Tertullian, the great Alexan-drians, Clement and Origen, are the richest
depositaries of the apologetic thought of the first period. The greatest apologists of the
patristic age were, however, Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine. The former-was the most
learned and the latter the most profound of all the defenders of Christianity among the
Fathers. And Augustine, in particular, not merely in his "City of God"
but in his controversial writings, accumulated a vast mass of apologetical material which
is far from having lost its significance even yet.

XI. The Later Apologetics

It was not, however, until the
scholastic age that apologetics came to its rights as a constructive science. The whole
theological activity of the Middle Ages was so far ancillary to apologetics, that its
primary effort was the justification of faith to reason. It was not only rich in
apologists (Agobard, Abelard, Raymund Martini), but every theologian was in a sense an
apologist. Anselm at its beginning, Aquinas at its culmination, are types of the whole
series; types in which all its excellencies are summed up. The Renaissance, with its
repristination of heathenism, naturally called out a series of new apologists (Savonarola,
Marsilius Ficinus, Ludovicus Vives), but the Reformation forced polemics into the
foreground and drove apologetics out of sight, although, of course, the great theologians
of the Reformation era brought their rich contribution to the accumulating apologetical
material. When, in the exhaustion of the seventeenth century, irreligion began to spread
among the people and indifferentism ripening into naturalism among the leaders of thought,
the stream of apologetical thought was once more started flowing, to swell into a great
flood as the prevalent unbelief intensified and spread. With a forerunner in Philippe de
Mornay (1581), Hugo Grotius (1627) became the typical apologist of the earlier portion of
this period, while its middle portion was illuminated by the genius of Pascal (d. 1662)
and the unexampled richness of apologetical labor in its later years culminated in
Butler's great" Analogy" (1736) and Paley's plain but powerful argumentation. As
the assault against Christianity shifted its basis from the English deism of the early
half of the eighteenth century through the German rationalism of its later half, the
idealism which dominated the first half of the nineteenth century, and thence to the
materialism of its later years, period after period was marked in the history of apology,
and the particular elements of apologetics which were especially cultivated changed with
the changing thought. But no epoch was marked in the history of apologetics itself, until
under the guidance of Schleiermacher's attempt to trace the organism of the departments of
theology, K. H. Sack essayed to set forth a scientifically organized "Christian
Apologetics" (Hamburg, 1829; ed. 2, 1841). Since then an unbroken series of
scientific systems of apologetics has flowed from the press. These differ from one another
in almost every conceivable way; in their conception of the nature, task, compass, and
encyclopedic place of the science; in their methods of dealing with its material; in their
conception of Christianity itself; and of religion and of God and of the nature of the
evidence on which belief in one or the other must rest. But they agree in the fundamental
point that apologetics is conceived by all alike as a special department of theological
science, capable of and demanding separate treatment. In this sense apologetics has come
at last, in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, to its rights. The significant
names in its development are such as, perhaps, among the Germans, Sack, Steudel,
Delitzsch, Ebrard, Baumstark, T511e, Kratz, Kiibel, Steude, Frank, Kal-tan, Vogel,
Schultz, Kahler; to whom may be added such Romanists as Drey, Dieringer, Staudenmeyer,
IIettinger, Schanz, and such English-speaking writers as Hetherington, H. B. Smith, Bruce,
Rishell, and Beattie.